stealthily and seeks its ends by indirection, a Satan never so dangerous as when wearing the garb of an angel of light.

Any attempt to portray Dr. Miner as a Melanchthon would be preposterous. It would deceive no one, and would revolt his friends as a grotesque disfigurement. No, in every drop of his blood he was a Luther; and in Luther's day with Luther's thought he would have gone to the Diet of Worms, and had he been confronted "by as many devils as there were tiles upon the house-tops," even the devils would have trembled, even if they had not believed. When aroused, not doubting that he was battling with a foe that meant only evil, he knew no honeyed words, no arts of indirection, no compromising accents. Literally he flamed, the "air was blue," and every syllable was a missile that struck home. If for a moment there was velvet, on the instant the claw came through. He habitually distinguished between Catholicism as a Church and Catholicism as a hierarchy, and for the hierarchy, the logic of the facts as he saw them, warranted him in applying, despite the Catholic protest, the cognomen "Romanism." For the Church proper he had no harsh epithets, - as respects this his only contention was that of calm reason. But in "Romanism," in the "papal hierarchy," he saw simply a political power and a sinister political aim. The immense increase in the number and the organic strength of Catholics in the United States; the despotism which united nearly all their forces; the fact that the "despot" was a foreigner, without faith in or sympathy with the free institutions of the great American Republic; that

this foreign usurper presumed to meddle with American politics, making strong at the polls whatever party was ready to serve him rather than its country, altogether kept the blood in A. A. Miner's veins boiling, particularly in the last decade of his life. If all of the speeches, sermons, printed articles, legislative protests and petitions, that came from him in this period were collected they would fill a large book.

The critics of Dr. Miner's attitude towards the politics of the Papacy -among whom were many of his friends, even admirers-replied that, whatever the logical sequence of Catholic premises in the particulars explained, it is a mistake to fancy that the possible sequences are necessarily the same; that this is not the age of Hildebrand, but of free schools, a free press, a free platform; that Protestants, outnumbering the Catholics by immense and permanent majorities, have only themselves to blame if the policy of a foreign prelate should subvert our free institutions; that, in fact, a startling crisis, where papal schemes subversive of freedom were unmistakable, would bring the people to the rescue, provided they were worthy of their intellectual, civil, and religious liberties. This reasoning, however, Dr. Miner deemed fallacious, and he believed that the facts of history were against it, and that it was vain to rest in an assumption of idle security while the enemy were sowing tares: and, truth to say, he had at command rather alarming facts in proof that despite their minority the party of the priesthood had the control of politics, particularly of the municipalities, to an extent that might well alarm a free people.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

THE PREACHER AND ORATOR.

THE art of public speaking, as analyzed by the mas

ters of rhetoric, includes many varieties of form and purpose. Every one who has listened to George W. Curtis, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edwin H. Chapin, and Henry Ward Beecher; to Caleb Cushing, Rufus Choate, Edward Everett, and Daniel Webster, could but be deeply impressed with the radical differences which made of each an embodiment of a distinct species of the orator. The bare thought of Beecher attempting the manner of Chapin, or of Chapin making the style of Beecher his model; of the scintillating, half-dreaming Emerson seeking to express himself in the lucid, orderly prose of Curtis; or of the verbose, eccentric, quaint, and marvellously fluent Choate speaking in the sombre, cumulative periods of Webster, evokes at once a sense of the grotesque. "Every genius is unique." The late Edwin

1 It was the never-to-be-forgotten privilege of the present biographer to be one of the immense throng that listened to Daniel Webster on occasion of his last speech in Faneuil Hall, for two hours holding, with the strength and enthusiasm of youth, by the iron pickets that surround the rostrum. A few months before this occasion, the Abolitionists had been refused the use of the "Cradle of Liberty," on the ground that further agitation of the slavery question, particularly of the so-called "Omnibus Bill," which included a surrender of the "Wilmot Proviso," and the acceptance of the "Fugitive Slave